In July, Jean-Frédéric completed a mass-upload of 3.000 images of historical monuments in the Paris region, from the Ministry of Culture “Base Mémoire” and using open data from data.iledefrance.fr. The upload was made using the GlamWikiToolset, which helped building French expertise of its workings and unveiled some bugs which were filed. A pre-upload alignment, one manually made by Léna and Symac, as well as an automatic mapping of communes codes to Commons categories using Wikidata, resulted in 9237 categories added to the files, and 99.3% of the files bearing at least two categories. Thanks to this upload we now have pictures for a few dozen monuments without any illustration before.

On July 6, the first German cultural hackathon "Coding da Vinci" ended with the presentation of the 17 applications developed during the 10-week working period. The winners were awarded their prizes in an appropriate setting at the Jewish Museum Berlin. For the first time, hackers and culture enthusiasts were able to use 20 datasets from 16 cultural institutions, e.g. bird songs, pictures from Berlin in the 18th century or sounds of musical instruments. More than 180 people attended the ceremony including the happy winners (see right). The five winning applications were: an alarm clock that wakes you with bird sounds and can only be silenced when identifying the bird, an app that matches pictures of a Berlin of the past with the present city, visualization of a list of Nazi-looted books, a hardware hack that made a beetle alive and a website where you can play musical instruments yourselves. You can find all of them on the website of the hackathon.

This year, WMDE started a new series of events called "Das ABC des Freien Wissens". Going through the alphabet, we define terms and concepts that are both for relevant for culturally interested public and Wikimedians. Experts are invited and discuss certain topics in a moderated discussion round. Furthermore, there are art interventions related to free knowledge included in every event, like open source sound installations, that can be reused by everyone.
After talking about the concept of digital commons (german: Allmende), experts and interested attendees talked about the Bookmarket of the future. Last month, under the title Crowdrock, the music industry of the future was discussed. Theres always a strong focus on the question, if open systems and free licences can and will be inplemented in all these areas. The next salon has the title "Datenberg", hackers and big data-experts will talk about positive and potential dangerous effects of big data.

ICOM Italy, Italian section of International Council of Museums, organized this event in order to gather museums' professionals, cultural institutions and associations interested in discussing the future role of museums in Italy, proposing a new model for them based on a strict relationship between local museums and their territories. This new model involves implications in traditional ways of organizing and funding museums and therefore needs lots of discussion.

More than 400 photographs of the 1899-1900 Siboga Expedition were donated to Wikimedia Commons by the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam. These are historical photographs of Indonesia: many smaller and larger islands, inhabitants, industry, flora and fauna.

Of course we warmly invite everyone to use these images - all public domain - in Wikimedia projects and beyond!

The Expedition Wikipedia project includes several university courses as well. From May to early July, a group of 9 students from Maastricht University have written and improved almost 20 articles about historical travel books and their authors, on English Wikipedia and in other languages. More information is available on the course page on English-language Wikipedia. A similar course is in preparation for September-October at Utrecht University.

Naturalis is considering a content donation. Sebastiaan ter Burg gave a presentation at Naturalis about the possibilities, such as content donation strategies and promotional events after a donation.

Liam Wyatt introduces himself over Skype. The Amsterdam Museum, Rijksmuseum, University Museum Utrecht, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and National Library were trained/guided in using the GLAMwiki Toolset.

5 GLAMs were trained in using the GLAMwiki Toolset during a workshop on the 28th of July. The workshop started with an introduction by Liam Wyatt, the GLAMwiki Toolset Coordinator at Europeana. The Amsterdam Museum, Rijksmuseum, University Museum Utrecht, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and National Library worked with the toolset. The workshop was not only a success because most GLAMs were able to do an upload or knew what was restricting them, but also because the GLAMs had a chance to exchange knowledge and ideas about content donations, selecting content and metadata, etc. The manual of the GWT has been improved with the feedback and notes of the participating GLAMs.

Users ArildV and Einarspetz used train, bus, car and bikes during a two day photo hunt in Hudiksvall and Delsbo at the end of July. Travelling around in the area they visited heritage sites, fishing sites, city centres and several other places. Some of the photos are saved for Wiki Loves Monuments, but the ones not in scope for the contest can be found on Commons

The memories of attending the GLAM-Wiki Conference in London last year may have faded for many of us, but a year after the conference we wanted to see what impact it had on the participants. For this reason we have run a 'long term effects' survey that was circulated to all the attendees and answered by 34 people. The full results can be seen here. Particularly inspiring is the 'Action' section, which shows what a great effect the event had on the participants. Enjoy reading the report!

...Like a bird on the wing, Onward, the sailors cry, Carry the lad that's born to be king, Over the sea to Skye

As part of the National Library of Scotland's GLAMWiki collaboration with Wikimedia UK, over 1000 images have now been made available from NLS collections on Wikimedia Commons. This release follows the Library's adoption of a more open digital content licensing policy, which came into effect this April. The new policy releases .jpg versions of out-of-copyright digital content onto a CC-0 license, along with all Library-generated metadata. Collections uploaded include photographs of the construction of the Forth Bridge and the collapse of the Tay Bridge, early 19th century sketches of Scottish locations from John Claude Nattes' and James Fittler's Scotia Depicta, nearly 200 19th century theatre posters and photographs from the Library's Weir Collection, and 700 files from the expansive Jacobite prints and broadsides collection (see below). This release represents the start of the Library's commitment to uploading content to Commons, and some 10,000 files have been identified for upload over the coming year.

Ally Crockford, the Wikimedian in Residence at the NLS, has completed her first year in post, making her the longest standing WIR in the UK. To celebrate... she wrote a great 12 month summary report - click here to enjoy. Congratulations Ally!

The Tank Museum in Dorset has given us some complementary tickets for Wikimedians to attend on weekdays when things are usually quiet enough for tripods to be allowed. This section and its photographs by Mightyhansa who visited the museum this July.

I frequent museums regularly and have learnt what can and can't make a museum work; they have done a good job at the tank museum. The museum was well organised and laid out. Most of the exhibits were well labelled and easy to find, this was made even easier by the small platoon of volunteer/guides (almost exclusively retired men with a tanky glint in their eye!), who helped me locate a few exhibits I couldn't find. The size and scale of the place is not to be underestimated, those tanks are big beasts and there are a lot of them!

The main challenge with taking photos is indeed the spacing between the exhibits, which means one inevitably gets other exhibits and signage in the shot. I didn't have too many problems with the lighting, but it was a nice sunny day, which was useful when it streamed through the warehouse skylights. I did have to keep switching between using natural and artificial light for the photos. I am only an amateur photographer, with no formal training, which may have actually helped. It is my opinion that you can only take a photo of what is in front of you, in the conditions available. I don't see any of my pictures making it to 'photo of the month', but I feel it is possible to document most of the tank museum exhibits with some degree of success if you aren't too fussy about the odd wheel or turret either side of your subject.

KV1B, Russian Heavy Tank

Charioteer

German Panzerkampfwagen III

Valentine "Scissors" Bridgelayer

Swedish Infanterikanonvagn 91

Crossley Chevrolet Armoured Car

Notable exceptions include some of their cornerstone exhibits, which the museum has rewarded with a diorama or special setting. These include Little Willie, which is on a revolving pedestal surrounded by perspex (I'm not making it up!); their Mark I tank, which is splattered with mud as part of a WWI trench diorama; and other key WWI exhibits. I will try to detail this on the Wikimedia page as I go through my photos.

Also worth mentioning is that the museum was very much a live museum, there are several large warehouses and workshops, one of which has a public viewing gallery. While these setting aren't ideal for shooting exhibits, I saw several tanks being shunted around or driven about as they reorganised and I feel a more local Wiki-photographer might be able to take advantage of this. I didn't make any effort to meet any curator or management. Maybe an initial chat with them, with the right tone might yield some good photos of exhibits that are being moved and maintained (the machine and mechanics that maintain them are as impressive as the exhibits themselves).

Thanks again to Wikimedia UK and the Tank Museum for the opportunity, I'm looking forward to finishing the processing and uploading of to my photos and improving the content of the Wikimedia projects

We had a full house of 18 attendees at London's ICA for our Feminist Film Edit-a-thon, but only three hours in which to train and create new content. We never have enough time, and there were the usual challenges of a mixed ability group, some struggling to create accounts and others wanting to explore the detail of referencing templates and the Wikipedia Citation tool for Google Books. An impressive 22 new articles have been created and many more expanded. And there has been an unusually high level of follow-up activity, probably due to many of the attendees being passionately involved in feminist film itself. We were fortunate to be very well-supported by the ICA and the University of Kent. And we've had great coverage from the F word, in particular highlighting the importance of demonstrating notability for new articles if you want to avoid deletion. Afterwards, there was a two-hour panel discussion chaired by Sarah Turner), then a showing of the seminal 1987 film, She Must Be Seeing Things (one of our 21 new articles, and a future "Did You Know..."), co-starring Lois Weaver, who was at our Live Art and Feminism edit-a-thon, exactly three months earlier. Small world.

Jonathan Cardy talked to the London Skeptics July meeting and afterwards ran a Wikipedia surgery answering questions from several Wikipedia editors there, and invited the skeptics to the following Conway Hall edit-a-thon. This is one of a number of tests at moving away from new editor recruitment as that is the healthiest part of the lifecycle of an editor we are still getting thousands of new people each month to do their first five edits. The aim of surgeries is to help existing editors who are encountering problems or simply want to talk to more experienced editors.

As noted last month, The Natural History Museum has donated two Epson Expression Model 10000XL flat bed scanners, with Graphic Arts, USB2 and Firewire interfaces. These are now available to loan out to cultural institutions who wish to digitise and make available their collections.

GLAM Wikipedians are reminded that they and their editing-trainees can register for an ORCID identifier, to disambiguate themselves from others with similar names, and to associate their contributions with any academic or public outreach authorship. ORCIDs can then be displayed on user pages, and may also be added to articles about GLAM academics. See WP:ORCID, or contact Andy Mabbett, Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID, for details.

Breaking news: there was a great deal of GLAM activity at Wikimania (8-10 August). Watch for a bumper report, next month!

Dorothy Howard, Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Metropolitan New York Library Council, was also awarded a PEG grant to extend her GLAM-Wiki work at METRO to a 3-day, part time working week with the Metropolitan New York Library Council, continuing into January, 2015. Using these funds, Dorothy is set to extend her outreach and activities outside of the METRO-membership so that she may offer GLAM-Wiki trainings, consultation, and Wiki/Open Access events planning support to a wider breadth of institutions in the New York area.

In the month of July, the Metropolitan New York Library Council's activities have included consultations about Wikipedia with four new GLAM-Wiki institutions that hope to develop projects, a volunteer training held at the Józef Piłsudski Institute of America to support their GLAM-wiki volunteer editors, as well as continuing consultation and project and logistical support among other New York Institutions with active Wikipedia projects. Several fall GLAM-Wiki projects with METRO will be announced shortly.

At a workshop in Cambridge in June, a working group was founded that aims at making documents marked up in JATS more amenable to reuse by automated tools like the Open Access Media Importer (see below). This workgroup - dubbed JATS4R (JATS for reuse) - will have regular teleconferences on the first Wednesday each month at 4pm UK time. The first of these took place on July 2, where issues around signalling license information were discussed. JATS is the XML standard for ingesting scholarly articles into PubMed Central, and the JATS4R group was sparked after inconsistencies had been observed in the XML that publishers actually deliver to PubMed Central.

Tests for importing the full text of scholarly articles into Wikisource (and the associated images into Commons) continued, with a number of bugs squeezed in the process. Some of these bugs reflect the inconsistencies mentioned above and inform the JATS4R process with concrete examples.

The following represents a selection of the ca. 300 files that have been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month, bringing the total to over 17,200. If you can think of wiki pages where these files could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.